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Motorola Xoom

Yup, I’m officially a gadget whore. I bought a VerizonMotorola Xoom for delivery on launch day a while back. I’ve been busy moving and working so this is the first chance I’ve had to write anything up on it. iFixit has a great teardown of the Motorola Xoom. I’m going to talk some about the hardware, ups and downs, and the software a bit too.

The Hardware

The Ups

First off it’s definitely speedier than the HTC Incredible and it should be! It also seems to be faster than my netbook, a Dell Mini 9, and the display is certainly larger, clearer than the Mini 9’s.

The Xoom has 1G of memory, but part of that is lost to the display and other things, so the Linux Kernel ends up showing 742MB of RAM.

As to battery life I can’t make any reasonable comparisons WRT battery life against the phone since the Incredible has a bitty itty battery, and the Xoom has a pretty big cell inside of it. 1300 or 1450 mAh stock for the Incredible vs. 3250 mAh for the Xoom, however Seido has a monster 3500 mAh LiIon upgrade for the Incredible, but that requires a different back obviously. I’ve yet to actually run the battery down to the point where it shuts off. If I’m using it REALLY heavily then it’ll last a day and a half, maybe more, if it’s mostly sitting idle on my night stand or something it lasts a good week without a plugin. You definitely seem to get the claimed 10 hours of active/non-standby battery time, unlike the HTC Incredible when it first came out where you were lucky to get 3-4 hrs on standby.

I still don’t yet have 4G, not that there is coverage in Montana at all anyway. The inbuilt 32GB of storage has been sufficient so I haven’t had need to pop in an SD card yet, though that is supposedly functional now that the first round of software updates came out.

The integrated WiFi is 802.11 a/b/g/n – the 802.11a was great for me when I was in the apartment complex where the 2.4GHz spectrum was basically unusable due to so many APs.

You get a solid front camera rating in at 5MP and a solid rear camera rating in at 2MP — both are video capable, but I haven’t dug into the video capabilities very much. I’m sure someone, somewhere, has.

It has a HDMI “D” connector, I think they call that microHDMI, I haven’t had a chance to use this yet either, but supposedly it is capable of 720p output. No idea if it outputs sound or not (it SHOULD!)

And The Downs

*NO* ability to charge from USB on the Xoom. I’m not even sure if it runs from USB power when it’s plugged in, but it certainly does not charge via USB. The only charging option is a 12V 1.5A wall-wart (global 100-240V 50/60Hz) with an absolutely tiny diameter barrel connector. I understand why they went this way, they upped to a 7.4V instead of 3.7V cell, but they could have built in a voltage booster so you could atleast run off USB in a pinch, or charge over a 24 hour period. The other complaint I have about the charging arrangement is that the connector sticks out from the tablet pretty far when plugged in (see the picture, the USB connector there gives you a sense of size I hope) and is very likely to be broken off.

The touch screen seems to occasionally lose it’s marbles a bit, but I’m not sure if I should blame the touchscreen or the screen protector Verizon sells in their kit. Locking and then restarting the screen with the power button on the back clears it up. I’m hoping this is either the screen protector, or, a simple software fix as it is kind of irritating at times.

The “dock” is a useless piece of trash. It’s almost impossible to get the stupid thing to line up so you can even use it, it only has audio output and charging capability (no USB nor HDMI pass-through). Changing the “shoe” on the bottom of the Xoom to include some holes for alignment pins would fix this.

New Apps/Features

The new GMail app for Android 3.0 is SO much better than the old for the phones. The layout it’s using though really requires the extra screen real-estate.

The new browser is faster, and the context bar(?) at the top where it shows your tabs, lets you touch to get the address bar, open new tab, close a tab, etc, is far more intuitive and easy to use than the old browser was.

One of the more interesting new apps I haven’t played much with yet is the Movie Studio app. This lets you take video and pictures and actually edit together whole sequences right on the Xoom. It’s actually fairly speedy, probably taking advantage of hardware acceleration to achieve that.

The CNN app that they demo-ed sort of sucks, the stack widget can’t or won’t display anything but Top Stories, the scrolling when you’re reading stories is ALWAYS along the left hand side of the device making reading anything very awkward with the majority of the screen taken up by whatever extra media is associated with the story. There’s also no way to get to the home screen if you jump into the CNN App from the widget (the back button doesn’t always do it for some reason, sometimes it takes you back to the Android Home screen, sometimes it actually successfully puts you at the CNN App’s home)

The YouTube Stack Widget also sucks because, again, no control over what it’s displaying.

Older apps and widgets are still a bit flaky, despite Android 3.0 being backwards compatible, some apps do bad things that don’t show up until you’re running multi-core. There also may be bugs in Dalvik, so we’ll see how this fleshes out in the months to come.

Command Line Goodness

And just a bit of command line output goodness so anyone whose curious can see exactly what the thing is running and what hardware/modules get active in this non-4G Xoom.